Tag Archives: #CallCenterHell

The Second Chance at the Second Half of Life

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It’s been two months since I’ve had a period. Now I could always spontaneously ovulate at any time and start the countdown all over again but as of now, I’m in the countdown to the grand finale of peri-menopause to total menopause. I am not missing my periods at all, and I’m not missing the insane PMS (pre-menstrual syndrome) I was having either. Now my body is slowly beginning to heal and adjust to the new reality of the second half of my life.

It was forty years ago this year that I was diagnosed with scoliosis, which is curvature of the spine. Mine was diagnosed in the fall of 1986 when I was twelve years old, though people had noticed my spine was starting to twist and curve when I was about eight years old. But since I was fat and clumsy, I guess no one thought anything of it. To correct the curvature, it would take complete spinal fusion surgery, which is extremely expensive, just like it was back in 1986, which is why I didn’t get it (also, because I was fat and the doctors wanted me to lose weight first, too). So between forty-plus years of scoliosis, massive years of stress, then the huge hormonal shift of menopause, my body has taken a battering. But with the hormonal situation beginning to level off, I feel like I’m getting a second chance with the second half of my life.

In addition to peri-menopause/menopause, scoliosis, working through what is probably a diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress disorder, or what I call ‘silence’, I’ve also had to learn and understand that I am neurodivergent with an unofficial diagnosis of autism and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. I would say in the last ten years my life imploded into a huge pile of broken pieces that I’ve been sorting through and slowly putting back together. But what I’ve gotten out of this is something that no one can take away: clarity, peace, and healing. Most of all, if someone ever tells me to my face that if I don’t shut the fuck up and go along with their bullshit or I’ll end up all alone and no one will ever love me or want to be around me at all, I can look that person directly in the eye and say, “Fuck you.”, and then walk away with my head held high. Because that motherfucker, and no one else including myself, knows what the future will bring. But I’m not going to stay silent and still. Instead, I’m going out into he world and finding what’s out there.

Healing is possible. It’s a long, hard road but well worth traveling in order to reach the light of day. Because it was ten years ago that I walked away from my last regular day job in call-center hell. As I drove away, I blasted the song ‘Light of Day’ by Joan Jett and that song is just as true for me now as it was on that day. It’s been hard because it’s been such a struggle, and I know I’ve probably burned a few bridges along the way and for that I am truly sorry. That’s regret, guilt, shame, and remorse I will carry for the rest of my life. But at the same time, I managed to keep myself off the streets and on the road instead, and for that I’m grateful that I didn’t give up or quit, and that I had a lot of help along the way, too.

Over the years, I’ve talked about ‘trauma brain’, or the part of your brain that was seriously warped and fucked up by repeated exposure to assholes as I’ll put it. This is the part of your brain that lies its’ ass off to you and tells you that you’re worthless and will never accomplish anything, and why do anything worthwhile in the first place. Learning how to stand up to that part of your brain is liberating and hard but in the end, well worth it. The human brain is amazingly resilient and also able to adapt and change if you regulate the input and output yourself.

The reason I’m writing this is to say that it does get better. Slowly but surely, in tiny increments and small moments in time, things do get better. So for those you barreling into forty or fifty, hang on and hang in there. For those of you coming into forty, hang on because it’s going to get really bumpy. For those of you coming into fifty, it will start to smooth out. Yes, you’ll take longer to heal up, longer to recover your energy, but hey, life isn’t a race to the finish. Take your time and enjoy things and as my father always used to say, don’t sweat the small stuff.

Birthday Lessons – You Don’t Have to Be Perfect

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April 30, 2015 – The reason I remember this date was that I wrote it down on a sticky note along with this phrase, “Everyone else is just as full of shit as I am, but that doesn’t make me a bad person.”

I wrote that down after I did a call-listening session with my manager at the time. These sessions were one of the worst parts of my years in call-center Hell and I will always prefer a root canal over them as with my root canal I had good drugs and an endodontist who knew exactly what he was doing. Sadly, I did all my call-listening sessions without any drugs or alcohol. Now, I was working from home at the time so it was all done over the phone so at least I didn’t have to work my ass off to keep my face and voice completely neutral like I did in a face-to-face session.

This call started off pretty routinely but then I read some information that turned out to be incorrect. Once I realized this, I immediately informed my caller of the incorrect information and apologized, then I continued the call with all the correct information and resolution. Now I wasn’t expecting a ticker-tape parade or anything like that but I believe the proper response to catching my own mistake and apologizing for it and taking ownership of it should have been, “Good catch.” Instead, my manager started off with this: “You should have known better.”

Now as you might have read in my piece yesterday, words like that would have made me beat the living shit out of myself mentally and emotionally. And that was because I had held myself to a standard of perfection no human being could ever maintain or even reach, and because of that every single mistake, no matter how big or small, or unintentional, and no matter that I would do everything to fix my mistakes, was never good enough. But on that day in April 2015, my mind said ‘Enough!” to that bullshit. I didn’t say anything to my manager as I let her drone on because I was reaching for my sticky-note pad and writing down that phrase along with the date. I kept that on my desk where I could see it and read it every time I looked at it and in time, the phrase sank into my mind and helped me break my silence and begin to heal.

You don’t have to be perfect and if you make a mistake, take ownership of it and apologize, then repair the damage as best as possible and learn from it. And if that isn’t good enough for someone, just tell them to ‘fuck off’ and walk away. Because people who think that isn’t good enough are just emotionally-immature dumbasses who can’t think their way out of a paper bag. Someone who tries to hold someone to an impossible standard of perfection is trying to deflect people away from them who they know see right through their bullshit. Don’t give in to them and don’t stick around and listen to their bullshit excuses.

A couple of months later, my manager called me and said I got a low customer satisfaction score and she saw that the call had been recorded and she wanted to listen to it with me. She said she was surprised by the low score as she had been listening to my calls and she really liked how I was doing. So she cued up the call and about a minute or so into it I remembered it- lady called in with a big spiel which I paid close attention to and then I told her I could call her provider to see what the problem was on their end and find a solution. Well, she didn’t want me to do that and she went off on her spiel again, not being rude or loud, but just like caught up in a loop. Again, I offered to help her and tried to frame it in a positive and confident way but she just wasn’t having it. After the second spiel, I heard my manager go, “What in the world is her problem? You’re trying to help her.” After the call, my manager said I had been nothing but kind and courteous to this lady and since the lady didn’t leave any feedback for me, my manager said she would appeal the low score. A couple of months later, I managed to see my scores and saw that she got it overturned. And after that, I could do no wrong in her eyes and when I got reassigned to a new manager, she flat-out told me she didn’t want to lose me on her team. I thanked her for the compliments and told her sadly I wasn’t a free-agent and had to go wherever I was assigned to.

In the end, because I refused to beat the crap out of myself and instead, started believing in myself, I earned her respect and got her on my side. But it was sort of the beginning of the end because it made me realize I had real skills and knowledge and call-center work was running into a dead-end. And not chasing perfection helped me see that and make the decision I needed to in the following year.

But in the end, the lesson here is this: don’t try to be perfect, and don’t think you have to be, and most of all, don’t give in to anyone who tries to force you to be perfect because that’s not possible. Do your best with what you have to work with and know that you’ll win some and you’ll lose some, but that’s not the end of the world. In reality, that’s just the beginning of a better life.

Conversations From the Road – Nostalgia With Honesty

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This morning I did three back-to-back drop-offs at one of the places I used to work, the place I worked at the longest before becoming an Uber driver. It’s a massive company campus and it was nineteen years ago this month since I first drove onto that campus for my first interviews and my first new-employee orientation. I have a lot of good memories of that place, along with a few bad ones, too. The first stint I worked there I worked with some truly awesome people, and though the second stint had good people, they weren’t enough to keep me there.

Do I have any regrets about walking away from my former life as I call it, my old life, if you will?

Not really. I know my past experiences helped make me the person I am today, and yes, gave me a ton of stuff to work through, too mentally and emotionally. What I thought this morning was that for the first stint I worked there, I had a raging case of Imposter Syndrome because that’s where most of my lack of self-confidence came from. I honestly thought I really didn’t belong there and was given a lot of opportunities by people who didn’t know how terribly insecure I was. But a few people, including the director of the unit I worked in during my first stint, could see past the façade I tried to maintain and sometimes even believed in. She wanted to help me grow my skills professionally but when she was reassigned that was the beginning of the end for me. I’m glad that I made the decision to leave when I did because of I was just smart enough to listen to my instincts telling me things were not going to go well from that point forward. Yes, it was true back then that my father’s health was declining and I needed to be there for him but I had other valid reasons to leave, too. So no regrets about leaving, or even coming back.

But I do have one big regret about my return for my second stint: I’d only been gone a little over a year when I came back and yes, there had been a big reorganization, but the nuts-and-bolts of what I did and the systems I’d worked on had barely changed at all. It was coming back to me quickly when I got on the systems along with my knowledge of how to train and mentor people that I’d been taught in my previous stint. And I honestly don’t think I came off as someone wanting to take over the class but my instructor sure as hell made me feel like the biggest ego-centric bitch when she raked me over the coals for wanting to help out people in my class. I actually had to tell several classmates later on why I wasn’t helping them when they asked me to. This was a red flag I tried to work through but it knocked me on my ass and I never quite back up from it.

At the last call center I worked in, in my first training class there, I decided to just keep my head down and learn what I could. I was very reserved with my classmates and in class in general. But my instructor, one of the most awesome I ever had, took me aside one day and asked me why I wasn’t speaking up or offering to help. I told her of my previous experience being raked over the coals for that and she was pissed off about that on my behalf. She then asked me to help her out and we became a heck of a good team. Later on, she became my manager and really went to bat for me when I needed her and though I’ve lost touch with her, if she ever did find me and need a favor, she’s got one coming.

In the eight years I’ve been unpacking and dealing with my past, I’ve learned not to have regrets. My dad used to say don’t do ‘would have, could have, should have’ because you can’t go back and change history, just learn from it as best as you can. And as he so often was, my crusty-old bear of a dad was right on this. For me, when I look back I will remember the good with great fondness. And I will remember the bad with great honesty.

And it’s been eight years this month since I walked (or better put, drove away) from my last call-center job. At the time, my reason for leaving was severe pain that I thought came from sitting on my ass for the better part of seventeen years. That ass-sitting wasn’t healthy for me of course, but I recently realized that I have NOT had that insane level of pain since then. And I don’t think it’s just because I walked away from that kind of job, but because I was really bottling up a lot of things and in the process, punishing myself for it. I mean, I’ve got messed-up and damaged body parts and I sit on my ass to do the job I do now and write, probably about as much as I did in call-center hell, yet I don’t have the level of pain like I had eight years ago.

If someone ever says to me that I should have known better back then and not made the mistakes I did, or walk away from things like I did, or any kind of bullshit like that I’ll say this: “Everyone else is just as full of shit as I am sometimes, but that doesn’t make me a bad person.” NO ONE has all the answers so don’t ever tell yourself you should have known better. Because my crusty-old papa bear of a dad was right when he used to tell me, “Regrets are useless.”

So as I drive onto the old campus, which I’m sure I’ll do as long as I’m an Uber driver, I might indulge in a little nostalgia, good memories, funny stories. But I know the bad memories will lurk on the sidelines, and I’ll acknowledge them and if asked, I’ll tell their stories honestly. But life is unpredictable, and we do the best we can with what we’re given to work with. The best thing I’ll always remember is the people I worked with, good people who were kind and generous and people I will always remember and wish them well wherever they are. And as for the jerks in my past, well… they’re just characters in the stories I tell now.